Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was born in Newark, New Jersey. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement. These friends became the nucleus of a group that named themselves the "Beat Generation" writers. The term was coined by Kerouac in the fall of 1948 during a conversation with Holmes in New York City. The word "beat" referred loosely to their shared sense of spiritual exhaustion and diffuse feelings of rebellion against what they experienced as the general conformity, hypocrisy, and materialism of the larger society around them caught up in the unprecedented prosperity of postwar America. In 1954, Ginsberg moved to San Francisco. His first book of poems, Howl, overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into more than twenty-two languages. Throughout the 1960's, Ginsberg took an active role in the growing anti-war and counter-culture movements. Ginsberg also studied under gurus and Zen masters. He went on to co-found and direct the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado. In the early 1970s Ginsberg's serious, bearded image with black-rimmed glasses, a tweed jacket, and an "Uncle Sam" paper top hat became a ubiquitous poster protesting the Vietnam War. As a spiritual seeker, founding member of a major literary movement, champion of human and civil rights, photographer and songwriter, political gadfly, teacher and co-founder of a poetics school, Allen Ginsberg defied simple classification. This material is intended to continually reveal the intelligence and beauty of Allen Ginsberg's aim of increasing consciousness on the planet. "I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidences of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick, Some hand placed them there - that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me . . . . Or that God was in front of my eyes - existence itself was God . . . . what I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body . . . my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe that I'd been existing in."
